Abstract: Industrialised countries are aware that innovation is the key to growth and increasing competitiveness in modern economies, and governments are constantly seeking for it to increase their world-class positioning. Thus, innovation has been a key factor for the development of these countries and several institutions have elaborated descriptive metrics and indicators to provide a comparative assessment of the performance of cities, regions and even nations. However, these general indicators do not include the triggering conditions nor the actions that certain cities have developed to break with traditional growth paradigms and have achieved a disruptive behaviour. The main purpose of this study is to identify and describe cities' inflection points, where they made great transformations and transitions in terms of world-class performances. The more the cities use the enabling drivers in a systemic and holistic manner, the more benefits they will have, reflected in their performance metrics.